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Longmont man summits Mt. Evans months after knee-replacement surgery

American Academy of Orthapaedic Surgeons offers Chuck Cooper a trip to Utah

By Pam MellskogLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
09/03/2013 11:23:15 PM MDT

Updated:
09/04/2013 08:49:08 AM MDT

Chuck Cooper, 65, stops for a photo on the northeast face of Mt. Evans on Labor Day, less than four months after the second of two knee-replacement surgeries he had this year.
(
Courtesy of Chuck Cooper
)

LONGMONT -- On two new knees he received earlier this year, Chuck Cooper climbed on Labor Day to the top of one of Colorado's highest peaks and looked forward to October, when he will hike a Utah mountain.

Mt. Evans, which sits 35 miles west of Denver near Idaho Springs in the Arapaho and Pike national forests, was the 65-year-old Longmont man's seventh fourteener.

Cooper credits his surgeon, Dr. Brian Blackwood of Mapleton Hill Orthopaedics in Boulder, for replacing his right knee on March 13 and the left knee on May 15 with a less invasive method that made him good to go.

"He not only gave me my knees back. He gave me my next trip -- fourteener No. 8 -- when I didn't think I'd have that," Cooper said.

The previous story

But the trek -- chosen because Mt. Evans is one of only two fourteeners in Colorado with road access to the top -- helped Cooper test his knees going up and spare them the wear and tear of going down.

Few would call the northeast face route up from Summit Lake a snap, though.

"When I first learned that it was about a mile up, I thought, 'Well, a mile is a mile. Not so bad.' And yet it was a very tough mile," Cooper said. "I described it to someone by saying that it was like walking upstairs for two hours, two steps at a time."

The first half-mile follows the road and seems doable, he continued.

"Then, when you get to the marker and turn a corner off the road, you look at that mountain, and it's a mile straight up without any switchbacks," Cooper said. "They do have a trail, if only a foot wide, worked into the mountain for may be 80 percent of the time. But then there were other sections, may be 20 percent of the time, where it was more like bouldering, where there wasn't really a place to plant my poles."

Mission accomplished

Cooper stopped many times between 8:45 and 11 a.m., when they reached the parking lot where Ellen Cooper waited in the Prius. She joined them, walking 150 more vertical feet on the easy switchbacks to the peak.

"But the whole day was about testing my knees during strenuous exercise. And at the end of the day, I looked down at my knees, and they never hurt. That was just a dream. ... Accomplishing the climb put an exclamation point on the end of my two knee replacement surgeries."

When the American Academy of Orthapaedic Surgeons picked up the Aug. 25 Times-Call story about Cooper's climb, the media department envisioned filming the feat by helicopter.

There wasn't enough time to pull off the video adventure so AAOS proposed a Plan B -- dispatching a helicopter to film Cooper on an all-expenses-paid trip to climb a mountain in Utah next month.

"I said, 'Hey, guys. Slow down. I'm not sure I can do this yet,'" he said, laughing.

Successful surgery set the stage for his comeback, but something else got him up that mountain: His faith and his friend Ken Larsen, who at 62 has bagged all 54 of Colorado's fourteeners multiple times for a total of 100-plus mountain-top celebrations.

"On the way up, there were harder moments, but we just kept chugging forward," Cooper said. "And Ken was his usual, incredibly supportive self to get us there. ... So, in the last email (from AAOS), they said that if it would make me feel more comfortable with the idea, they would pay for Ken's trip out to climb with me in Utah. I think they'll do almost anything to make this happen."

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